Loss, Uncertainty, and Love Brought Me to Literary Translation

I often think about translation as a standalone language—without it, we all become our own islands, floating on a vast ocean without ever coming across each other.

Literary translation is not just about translation itself—it is about our relationship with the languages, the cultures that have been a part of our lives, and the journeys that brought us closer to all of them. Translation is various ways of storytelling, of putting ourselves in other cultural perspectives, and sometimes, in a particular community’s point of view, of giving voice to a story that travels across languages.

What does literary translation mean to me? For me, it is the possibility to retrieve my sense of belonging that propels me to translate one story after another. Over years, with all the languages I learned to speak, the ceaseless pursuits of words, sentences, and literature from all over the world built my world. My journey in translation brings the other end of the world closer to me; it brings me home.

I often think about translation as a standalone language, how without it, we all become our own islands, floating on a vast ocean without ever coming across each other. Translation is not just about communication; it is about approaching, crossing over; it is about understanding one another by learning how we express ourselves, how we interpret universality, and how we shape our languages based on the influence of our mother tongues.

For a very long time, I thought about languages as weathers, translation as traveling up in the sky, across weathers. Weather is the most vital part of nature that affects our everyday routines, our new plans in a new place, our emotions; it is a language we translate constantly to ourselves to understand what’s workable in the day, in a stretch of weeks, or even longer. Weather is the first thing we check in the morning, climate the first thing we research before we settle in a new country. It is an universal language: We all understand the main idea of a scorching-hot summer day; of a humid, rainy, stormy afternoon; and how the variations and changes of these weathers shape our emotions and existence.

In my New York apartment, I work at a red mahogany desk facing a small balcony. Here, I write and translate stories, thinking about all the tales I could bring from another culture. I watch the rain and how the weather changes. I think about how a thunderstorm in New York is different from a thunderstorm back in my Taiwanese hometown, how back home, walking under the rain often meant holding an umbrella and still getting fully soaked, and how the rain is pungent with the smell of chicken feces. I think about ways people complain about the weather, about how these complaints and the unspoken emotions stirred up say a lot about our relationship with the weather, with our languages.

Back in Taiwan, when I was in elementary school, my parents sent me to an after-school program to learn American English. Very quickly, I became fluent in a language that very few of my family members understood fully. I would bring back my English homework at the end of the day, sitting and writing among chattering elderly who spat and shouted Hakka at each other in the noise of the evening frying pan. My workbook would smell like a mix of homemade soy sauce and the stir-fried squid my aunt would stuff in my mouth. Besides the English sentences in front of me and the noise in the background, everyone looked like they were part of a mime—I didn’t know why they’d burst out laughing, why they’d suddenly stared at me, and why obeying my parents to work hard on English didn’t bring any intimacy with everyone else in the family. I was my own island all along.

Hakka and Taiwanese Minnan are unpredictable weathers to me. I only learned how to listen and observe, how to catch phrases of the best and of the worst moments in the family. I didn’t know how to participate. “You don’t learn Hakka from a book, nor do you memorize it with your pen. You just get adapted to it,” my uncle once said to me, laughing at my inaccurate pronunciation and my urge to keep a notebook about everything they said. During my travels, I was often told that one would get used to the local climate, despite discomfort, if one stayed fully exposed to the air, water, and sun long enough. I never know if language proficiency can be obtained simply by exposure. How do I give these dialects a home in me, especially when they’re already lost in us?

To my family, learning American English was a promise. And having their children learn English was one step forward to a better life in an English-speaking country. Speaking Mandarin with a mix of English words was an upgrade, a way to show our linguistic knowledge and sophistication and to display our hard work in studying.

How do I give these dialects a home in me?

In my after-school English class, we had a line of windows, long enough for each parent to claim a spot, so they could watch us speaking in our American teacher’s tongue, repeating sentences over and over so that the language became our own.

When I was seventeen, I enjoyed inviting my high school best friends to my apartment rooftop. From there, we were able to see the straight, dense asphalt roads stretching all the way to the horizon. Our eyes ran with the rays of the sunset all the way to the nearest sea. At this time, backpacking in Europe and studying in America were almost everyone’s dreams. Language was a way out, a way for me to form secrets with friends who also wished to fly out from our little islands. We commiserated about how our futures were based on entering the top universities with impossible full marks, which could only be done by studying in every possible moment. We wanted possibilities beyond that.

It was during this same time of my life that I learned about antipode cities. Knowing where exactly the other end of the world was from me gave me a destination, a dream that could be made possible one day with the languages I was learning.

It was said that in 1544, Portuguese sailors passed by Taiwan on their way to Japan. They witnessed the lushness of the island and called the place “Formosa,” which means “a beautiful island.” I later discovered that the antipode city of my hometown, 中壢 (Zhongli), is actually a northern city in Argentina that is also called Formosa.

Knowing where exactly the other end of the world was from me gave me a destination.

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A friend once told me that language is the way we see the world. To learn multiple languages is our attempt to understand and perceive the world in distinctive ways. The process of language learning is an asset, an opportunity for us to reflect on the meanings of why we learn the language, where this language will bring us, and how the process shapes our memories. With my dream of traveling to the other end of the world and living a life speaking a new language with full confidence, I found reasons to learn Spanish, reasons of love. Languages shape my relationships, and a memorable relationship can shape language.

When I met him, I was under the impression that Colombian Spanish would be our language, a language that would build us. At the beginning, my grammar was scratchy and I often made mistakes out of inconsistencies. I secretly consulted Google Translate to respond to his messages quickly, learning new words from sentences that came out of him so effortlessly. I learned to make steamed plátanos, fry arepas, cook sancocho, and dance salsa with him every weekend night. I was full of mistakes, all of which came from attempts to understand him. And with every word I learned, I was closer to his stories, to him, and to the other end of my world. He gave me his tongue.

I dreamed about the weather in his hometown near the snow mountain, one that was different from mine. Hilly and foggy. I dreamed about the Sierra Nevada in the summer and of all the lights lit up in the dark of the valley. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw myself swinging the beautiful Arhuaca mochila he gave me up my shoulder, feeling threads of the rough agave between my fingers, speaking with my new tongue.

A sense of loss, of confronting departure, is a language for me. I speak it my own way. I weave my emotions into my new tongue. Loss, uncertainty, and love brought me to translation. Every story I read and translated, every Rubén Blades song we hummed along with, brought him to me. Despite our daily calls, it was literature that led me deeper into his world. I wanted to read beyond Gabriel García Márquez, beyond Laura Restrepo—I wanted to read all the Latin American authors I hadn’t heard of, the famous ones and the ones that will become famous. I wanted language to lead me to his weather, to feel what he felt, and to understand what it was like growing up near a snow mountain, what it would mean to travel across the ocean to finally meet him.

He gave me his tongue.

It was seven o’clock in the evening when I landed in Pereira and got on an hour-long Uber all the way to Manizales. I saw the lights coming up all across the valley, the Sierra Nevada sleeping with a shadowy face, the air sighing with tears of fog. He was waiting at the top of the Chipre park, and by that time, his language had become mine. We spoke the same tongue as though they were two different languages.

We only met briefly, chatting with each other inconsistently among friends. The next day, I rode a horse in the rain, in the mist of Valle del Cocora, overlooking the wax palm trees that fell down the slope, under thin clouds that circled around the hills and caressed the shaken, the fallen, and the decayed. I was watching and walking through every quiet scenery woven together with our words, our memories, and the language he gave me to travel this far. Our language rebuilt this weather, this scenery, and it enabled everything around me to be vibrant with voices and stories.

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I remember when I first started writing stories in English, I was often told to italicize names of Taiwanese dishes, vocabularies about local religions, and words that are foreign in my English writing. My professors claimed that those were words we had to explain to non-Taiwanese audiences, words that were interesting, things that always raised questions, and things that didn’t make sense. As though being told to highlight our exoticness, like how one might pick highlighted tourist attractions of a city to show visitors who we are. Writing about Daoist religious ceremonies, displaying an array of local dishes, and narrating about Tawianese traditions and histories were fully encouraged, to a point I started to wonder: Should the stories I tell, despite their grief or trauma, all be full with the auspicious color red, packaged with blooming flowers, a tableful of local dishes, and all the things you know about us? Does this help me tell stories about my home, about us?

Sometimes, I imagine what people might say when they talk about weather in a place that is new to them. Instead of finding a big umbrella to be able to walk back home in a thunderstorm, do they talk about how strange and exotic it is for the rain to be all hot and heavy? Do they find ways to adapt, survive, and enjoy the place instead? Or do these new places all have to be like tropical islands in a fantasy, pleasant with the glow of sun, rich and abundant with what they’ve asked for, and comfortable enough to lie down and watch the sky? Should all tropical islands be like this?

When I translate, I think a lot about the emotions and trauma conveyed in a story. We decipher the meanings of a sentence and the particularity of each word in its original text, reimagining the flow, the tone, and the voice into another language. Understanding the language’s nuances and ways to help them cross over was the first step, but time and time again, I discovered it was emotions that we are translating—the vulnerability, pain, and trauma we hope to make visible from different parts of the world.

To become a translator, for me, is to become someone who is able to understand not only various languages, but also a diversity of emotional weathers coming from different cultural backgrounds. It is about the understanding of empathy. I wonder if “subcultures” truly exist, and if we need to define any part of a culture as a subculture to show how this culture is not participated in by the mainstream population. I ask myself, time and time again, why do I translate? How do I approach a culture enough to understand all its wounds, sufferings, and emotions in the most appropriate and respectful way possible?